R.I. State Police crack down on drunken driving

Monday

Dec 30, 2013 at 9:52 PM

The troopers’ special patrol, funded by the federal government and focused on arresting impaired drivers, was part of an intensive enforcement program that will continue even after the holidays are over.

Brake lights that illuminate too frequently. A tire brushing the edge of a lane. A license or registration fumbled onto the car’s floor.

These are the subtler “cues” of intoxication that Navarro searched out Friday night as he and Trooper Kevin Cloud eyeballed vehicles and cited errant drivers along highways in the Providence area.

The troopers’ special patrol, funded by the federal government and focused on arresting impaired drivers, was part of an intensive enforcement program that will continue even after the holidays are over.

In 2013, the state police doubled these overtime patrols, deploying an additional cruiser to focus on drunken driving offenses 120 times, compared with 60 times in 2012.

As of Monday morning, troopers had charged 561 people with driving under the influence this year. That’s the highest number in four years — despite a diminished number of troopers on patrol overall in 2013 due to retirements and reassignments.

The special patrol program, financed with more than $90,000 in aid from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, generated 73 of those 561 arrests.

Col. Steven J. O’Donnell, the force’s superintendent, says the state police have also embraced various public outreach campaigns that aim to preempt drunken driving by helping people understand the risks and equipping them to stay away from the wheel if they are under the influence.

“We’re not going to arrest our way out of a drunk-driving problem,” says O’Donnell, who brims with DUI-related statistics and chairs the board of Rhode Island’s Mothers Against Drunk Driving chapter.

Nonetheless, over the past two years, the probability of Rhode Island’s troopers identifying an impaired driver has been better than 50 percent every time they’ve hit the road in a deliberate attempt to find one over the past two years.

And that’s what Navarro and Cloud were doing late Friday evening after leaving the Lincoln barracks.

They studied nearly every vehicle they saw, looking for various indicators of impairment, such as weaving, along with one of the biggest cues: lights that haven’t been switched on.

Excessive speed can indicate drunken driving, too.

Impaired drivers can usually perform one function well, says Navarro.

For example, a drunken driver might be able to keep the vehicle in the middle of the lane, but he or she can’t regulate speed, or vice versa.

“When you drive, you have to be able to do more than two things at once,” says Navarro, 39, who has a law degree and worked for the Rhode Island attorney general’s office before he joined the state police in 2005.

Cloud, 40, recently arrested a drunken driver who was traveling at about 125 mph.

On this evening, the troopers nab a collection of speeders.

One passes them in the high-speed lane, traveling at least 90 mph, drawing Navarro into a high-speed pursuit through the downtown area of Providence on Route 95.

At 1:26 a.m., about 20 minutes after the troopers drop off a Providence Journal reporter and photographer, they notice a blue Honda drifting from one travel lane into another on Route 95 north, according to Navarro’s report.

The Honda nearly hits a vehicle as it drifts, says the report.

The driver is Anthony Rucci, 55, of 296 Parkview Drive, Pawtucket, who is on his way home from a Japanese restaurant on Federal Hill.

Rucci has trouble getting his license out of his wallet; Navarro detects an odor of alcohol and notes Rucci’s watery eyes, the report says.

Rucci fails various field sobriety tests, it says. He agrees to a preliminary breath test, but he doesn’t blow into the device long enough, says the report.

This is how the extensive process of evaluating and arresting a drunken-driving suspect — a process that takes about three hours — begins, according Lt. Col. Michael Winquist.

Rucci was handcuffed and taken to the barracks in Lincoln. There, he was charged with driving under the influence, first offense, and refusing to submit to a chemical test.

He was locked up in the cell block, which is a lucky outcome, according to O’Donnell.

He asks: “Wouldn’t you rather have your friend on the cold slab of the cell block rather than on the cold slab in the morgue?”